Policy Background:

Texas’ state jail system, created in 1993, was originally intended to divert individuals with nonviolent offenses from crowded prisons and provide them rehabilitative assistance. However, individuals sentenced to state jail facilities have extremely limited access to treatment and programming options, and typically have no post-release supervision.[1] As a result, state jail releasees have the highest rates of re-arrest and re-incarceration among returning populations.

Texas policy-makers should permit a judge – with the consent of the district attorney – to reduce a person’s state jail felony offense to a Class A misdemeanor after he or she successfully completes all probation supervision and treatment requirements, provided the offense was not violent or sexually based. This would better incentivize a probation term (which costs 31 times less per day than a state jail term), for significant cost savings and longer-term recidivism reductions, while keeping critical safeguards in place.

Key Facts:

30.7% of individuals released from a state jail in FY 2011 (measured through FY 2013) were re-incarcerated. By way of comparison, an average 15% of individuals on felony direct supervision (probation) were revoked from FY 2009 to FY 2014.[2]

As of August 2014, there were nearly 11,000 individuals on hand in a state jail facility, 87% of whom were incarcerated for a nonviolent property or drug offense.[3]

Incarcerating one person in state jail costs taxpayers $47.30 per day.[4] Incarcerating all 11,000 individuals costs $520,300 per day, or nearly $190 million annually.

Probation is far less expensive than incarceration, costing the state only $1.63 per person per day.[5] And it is often more effective at addressing addiction and mental illness than incarceration: individuals on probation frequently have more access to drug treatment and mental health services than those incarcerated, and treatment programming results in lower levels of re-offending than strict incarceration.[6]

Probation conditions, which vary by judge and offense, typically require regular reporting to a probation officer, fee payments throughout the course of the probation term, full payment of court costs and fees, community service, meeting all mandated class or program obligations (e.g., class or program attendance, drug testing, etc.), school or employment attendance, abiding by restrictive conditions (e.g., curfews, drug and alcohol abstinence, avoidance of negatively influential peers or locations), and remaining law-abiding during the course of the probation term; depending on the offense, probation conditions may also require victim restitution. It is incumbent upon each probationer to ensure all conditions are met, making this a highly rigorous and regulated period under supervision.